When IDA launched the Enterprise Documentary Fund at Sundance 2017, the festival coincided with the Women's March and Trump's inauguration. The blizzard conditions underscored an overall feeling of sobriety, as attendees reeled from the unexpected electoral outcome. The whiteouts and slippery roads were the appropriate mise en scene, reflecting the uncertainty that so many felt. But there was also a palpable energy, with lots of planning and organizing, though, no one seemed sure to what end. Looking back, who could have foreseen the Muslim Ban, Cambridge Analytica, the crisis at our border
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When filmmaker Laura Nix walked into a dance studio in the San Gabriel Valley to find 40 people ballroom-dancing in the middle of the day, she thought, "What is this beauty? Why is this happening in the middle of the workday?" Intrigued, Nix signed up for classes and befriended Paul and Millie Cao, a middle-aged married couple who have dedicated themselves to hours of rigorous dance training and competition in addition to their full-time jobs. She began filming the Caos; as she explains, "You have to start every film with a question, and the question I had was, 'Why are you dancing so so
In the Absence begins with the usual narrative markers of a ship tragedy: a drone camera sweeps over the site, we hear a 911 call, security camera shows ominous developments inside the vessel, and we read a title: "On the night of 15 April 2014, the Sewol ferry departed Incheon Port, Korea. 476 passengers, including 325 students on a school trip to Jeju Island, were on board." Next morning the ship began to sink amid confusion and delayed governmental rescue efforts, and nearly an hour later the captain fled with half the passengers still aboard. The media reported that all had survived. But
John Haptas and Kristine Samuelson co-directed the Oscar-nominated documentary short Life Overtakes Me, an IDA Enterprise Documentary Fund grantee. Set in Sweden, the film offers an inside look at refugee families caring for children experiencing resignation syndrome, a trauma-related condition inciting a coma-like state lasting months or years. Interviewed together, the married filmmakers discussed their creative choices and production strategies. DOCUMENTARY: As a production crew of two, how did you structure your roles? KRISTINE SAMUELSON: John shot the film. I did the sound. We boomed
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to live in an ultra-conservative patriarchal society? If your answer is, "No, it's already depressing enough waking up in the nightmare of Trump’s America," read no further. However, if you've ever wanted to know what it is like to be a female in Afghanistan, to peek behind that particular curtain, then Grain Media and Lifetime Films have a documentary for you. Documentary recently spoke with director Carol Dysinger about the making of the IDA Documentary Award-winning Learning to Skateboard in a Warzone (if you’re a girl), and the significance of
After the success of her feature documentary A Suitable Girl, Al Jazeera's Witness series asked Smriti Mundhra to make another film. It wasn't long before she knew who she would like as her subject. In the wake of the 2016 US Presidential election, with everyone despondent and the news cycle intolerable, she had been looking for inspiration in local stories. Through online trawling she discovered Bruce Franks Jr., a celebrated battle rapper who had won a seat on the Missouri State Legislature. Franks had been very active in the Ferguson protests over the 2014 murder of the unarmed African
Though The Edge of Democracy is Brazilian filmmaker Petra Costa's final piece in a personal trilogy, it's the first to nab her an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary Feature. A year after the doc was acquired by Netflix at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, the cinematic exploration appears to have struck a timely chord far beyond the borders of the divided nation in which it is set. Costa's epic film is a sweeping mélange made up of the director's expert cinéma vérité camerawork and vast trove of home movies, plus archival footage and media coverage spanning decades of her country's history
For many years Yusuf Abdurahman, the charismatic protagonist of Eunice Lau's Accept the Call, seemed to be living the American Dream. A refugee who fled civil war in the '90s, Abdurahman went from a life filled with famine and death in Somalia to one of hope and possibility in Minnesota. One of the founders of what is now the largest Somali community in the United States, Abdurahman married, had kids, and today works as a translator and facilitator at a Head Start office. Though divorced, he continues to lovingly devote himself to his seven children—including his eldest, Zacharia, the reason
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. As the impeachment trial of President Trump gets underway, and as the US launches into another rough-and-tumble presidential election year, FRONTLINE presents America's Great Divide: From Obama to Trump, a two-part, four-hour documentary series investigating America's increasingly bitter, divided and toxic politics. Michael Kirk directs. Following Martin Luther King Jr. Day, explore the history of the American Civil Rights Movement through the definitive series Eyes on the
Sundance Film Festival is back at Park City this month. In addition to seven IDA-supported film screenings, our Executive Directory, Simon Kilmurry, will be moderating “ Streaming: Next-Generation Opportunities for Documentary Storytelling” panel. The protagonists of two IDA Enterprise Documentary Fund grantees, A Thousand Cuts’ Maria Ressa and Welcome to Chechnya’s Masha Gessen will open up about what it takes for journalists to go up against powerful regimes in the “ Truth to Power” session. Other IDA staffers will also be in attendance in various capacities: Filmmaker Services Manager Toni